Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday March 21, 2012 @01:57PM
from the no-place-to-hide dept.

ananyo writes "Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge have created a camera that is able to record images of objects hidden behind walls. They fire a pulse of laser light at a wall on the far side of the hidden scene, and record the time at which the scattered light reaches a camera. Photons bounce off the wall onto the hidden object and back to the wall, scattering each time, before a small fraction eventually reaches the camera, each at a slightly different time. The camera captures this time-of-flight information and uses it to reconstruct an image of the hidden object (abstract)."

Personally, I'd rather just see the technology improve so that the image is more accurate, which seems likely.

The 2 picosecond resolution is obviously the limitation here; just like that of a camera with a 240p resolution, or a low Frames Per Second. The faster a camera like this is able to collect reflected data, the better the overall quality.

Just think of the implications for photography and cinematography! Michael Bay would have a field day with this shit. And then someone with talent could ac

The 2 picoseconds is not the limitation. The limitations are the requirement for the object to stand still long enough to collect enough photons for a decent picture and the requirement to have a correctly placed flat surface.

In essence they are compensating for the surface not being a good mirror by using the run time of the photons and calculations.I guess in theory you could use curved surfaces as well, but you need to adjust the calculations accordingly. And even then you will have interference patterns

Two picoseconds is pretty damned quick. The fastest my old SLR would go was 1/5000th, and it needed fast film and lots of light to get an acceptable picture at that speed. Movie cameras operate at 1/24th of a second. 1/16th for a 35mm still in low light, but you need a tripod and pretty sedentary objects to film.

I just don't see artistic uses for this, but I see lots of military uses.

Two things. Film movie cameras are quickly disappearing. I think I heard that the last manufacturer has stopped production. 2nd, film movie cameras may capture 24 frames per second, but that doesn't mean their exposure time is 1/24th of a second. It is significantly less.

No it won't. Each frame is still 1/24 of a second apart in time. The object you are filming will have changed position by the same amount, regardless of how fast the shutter opens and closes.

The shutter is only open for some time less than the time between images, perhaps 1/100 or 1/500 of a second. It's probably not quite that fast, as I'd imagine that they use a fairly low speed film to get the best quality image.

Silly, that one was about a system at MIT that captured scatter at 2 x 10^-15 seconds resolution. This one is a system at MIT that captures at 2 x 10^-12 seconds resolution. Clearly they should be different stories on Slashdot.

That's just the description of the camera they built. Now someone is publishing about something else they can do with it. If you spend all that time building a cool piece of equipment, you're going to have a small team of students writing as many related papers as possible. Not really surprised.

At least initially, I feel like that won't work unless you already know what the lack-of-object-around-corner returns are. In other words, if you haven't already taken a "picture" of this corner without someone or something in it, it won't do you any good. You won't be able to take a device with you to an unknown location and expect to see what's around the corner.
And if you have time to set this up before something goes wrong, why not just put a camera around the corner?:)